Yahoo Photos: Start Migrating your Photos

Last month, Yahoo had announced that they will shutdown Yahoo Photos for the benefit of Flickr. They said that they whole process would take several months to complete and those who had stored their photos on Yahoo Photos were given different option to move an alternative service.

Yahoo has now announced that September 20^th is the last working day for Yahoo Photos. By then, users must move their photos to a different service because all photos on their site will be deleted. Although they are doing this for the benefit of Flickr, they are not forcing everyone to migrate to Flickr. Instead, they give you plenty of different options like Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, Photobucket.

If you are not interested in migrating, you can download all your photos or buy an archive CD from Englaze for $6.95 + $1.70 (shipping). Englaze, which is integrated with both Yahoo Photos and Flickr, is relatively weak in comparison to other options. You can try Backupr which gives users more control over which photos they’d like to back up and a CD of photos is free (plus $3.99 shipping worldwide), adding up to a total cost of less then half what Englaze is charging.

Usually, such announcements are potential headaches for users as services get transferred, moved, and users are forced to make decisions about how best to manage their photos. Blogs and other services like personals which rely on Yahoo Photos are the ones to be worst affected by this move.

Interestingly, Yahoo Photos provides no option for users to migrate their photos to Google owned Picasa Web Albums.